Most mornings I have a bowl of oatmeal with raisins for breakfast. Since I’m cheap, I buy generic raisins (and oatmeal, but this is about raisins). Lately I’ve noticed that the generic raisins have a LOT of twigs in them. I try to pick the twigs out before the raisins go in my bowl, but they are sneaky things those twigs and Anya likes to sneak non-de-twigged raisins in when I’m not looking. I am seriously considering switching to name brand raisins. I ask myself every morning, “Is saving $1 every couple of weeks worth eating twigs?”

2008 Resolutions

So, how did we do? Well, Kenny is not living in a temple, Andy isn’t ready for a marathon, and Anya skipped over crawling for her beloved scoot. However, I neither ate donuts every day nor gave anyone to the gypsies. Yay me!

Evidently, the people who designed Anya’s toothbrush were not gardeners.

Too bad I didn’t notice the similarity when I bought the toothbrush because now every time I see it, I squirm a little bit. I could never use this toothbrush myself, but lucky for Anya she hasn’t had much experience (yet) with the disgusting tomato horn worm.

The tomato horn worm is the most repulsive garden pest. It is yicky and it hides and you don’t see it and you are all “la la la” merrily picking yummy tomatoes and then you grab one and it bites you with its dragon-sized fangs of doom and you shriek and run and flail your arms in the air and fall to the ground in a puddle of hysterical bawling.

My mom has this huge industrial-sized pair of tweezers that she reserves for the hideous task of plucking these nasty creatures off a plant. I don’t have any of my own and have tried kitchen tongs…but they really don’t have a good enough grip to pry those nasty beasts away from their homes. And of course you can’t pull them off with your bare hands because you’ll get leprosy or flesh-eating sores or zits.

One time, when Andy was away at school, I found a tomato worm in the garden. I did the required shrieking and flailing, and then I called on my very brave roommate to save me. She got the bug off the plant and put it on the driveway and BAM SPLAT dropped a brick on it. The only thing more disgusting than a live tomato horn worm is an exploding tomato horn worm. Hrm. Or perhaps a tomato horn worm being ripped apart by a flock of hungry ducks.

After we voted this morning, we stopped at the Hardees in town. It only took us half an hour to get through the line at the polls, and we had some time before daycare “opened.” Probably 85% of the people in Hardees were wearing “I Voted” stickers, and I was thinking to myself how cool it was that so many folks had already voted. Then I thought…”I’m surrounded by a bunch of adults all wearing the same sticker on their shirt/coat/sweater.” I giggled. ‘Cause it’s funny.

So, go get your sticker and be one of the cool kids! Go vote! (This message not intended for Canadians or other weird foreigners.)

I’ve spent the last week smooshing, swatting, squishing, flattening, crushing, and obliterating every gnat I could find in my office. I took the two worst offending plants home, cooked one of the pots of dirt in my car for a few days, dumped most of the soil out, rinsed off the plants themselves, and brought everything back to work. Yes, there were still a few gnats about, but as I got things together and put down a layer of sand on the most tempting pots, I felt pretty confident about my successful annihilation.

Then I made that fateful mistake. I opened Pandora’s box (or in this case the bag of violet potting soil).

As I unzipped the ziplock-type closure on the bag of potting soil, a cloud of gnats shot up into my face and scattered to the four corners of the office. I shrieked! “CLOSE IT! CLOSE IT!” And I frantically tried to rezip the bag. A friend who was in the office practically jumped out of her chair, “What? What? You want me to close the door??”

“Noooooooo! Don’t trap us in here with them!!”

In the time it took me to reseal the bag and my friend to run out the door, all billionityeleven of the freed gnats were gone. Where are they? I’m a little frightened.

Also, I saw an albino fungus gnat. I called my friend over to see it. She’s all, “That is NOT an albino gnat. That is a piece of lint.” I think she’s just trying to reassure me that the gnats have not begun to mutate. This is a research facility after all. Who knows what sorts of wild gnats could have escaped from a lab to mate with my fungus gnats.

My office is infested with fungus gnats. A coworker just inhaled one up her nose. My desk is littered with their teeny corpses. At least they are slow and fairly easy to kill. They also have no shame or decency and are having sex on my plant right before my very eyes. I already quarantined one plant, but they just moved to another one. DARN THEM. What are they doing?!? My plants aren’t fungusy!

(As a MG intern, I should know all about this and how to stop it, shouldn’t I? No, no. I’m learning that being a MG (intern or full) doesn’t really necessarily mean you know anything about plants and gardening, but everyone expects you to. I want to tell them, “Dude! I listened to people talk about trees and looked at pictures of pretty flowers for a bunch of hours! Yes, I can tell you the parts of a plant, but I do not know what that strange thing growing in your backyard is!” Someday I’ll talk about MG and what it is and stuff, but not now. Now I will go back to the gnat massacre.)

We’re still here just not blogging. Alas, none of the ducks have returned. We were talking with our vet about it, and she thought it was probably a fox or three.

I started a new job a couple weeks ago. On the plus side, the work is more interesting / challenging, the salary is a little bit more, and I can work from home when I need to. On the negative side, I have to share an office and my back is to a floor-to-ceiling window that is open to the main reception area for the entire building. This has the potential to put a serious crimp in my web surfing. The folks I share the office don’t really care so much, but when the Big Cheese walks by and sees the bright pink screen of someone’s blog….yeah.

Luckily, eventually my desk will be moved around and things will be dandy, but who knows how long that will take. It’s not a simple desk that can be flipped around; it has a hutch and it’s got a couple of pieces and the U movers will have to come in. For a while, there was a large bookcase there to block the window as a temporary measure. I loved it, but no one else (including 2nd Big Cheese) liked it. The bookcase was removed a few days ago.

I feel naked.

But what to do? We can’t hang shades or blinds or curtains. We aren’t allowed to put temporary frosting film on the windows. I suggested we hang some posters of cute guys, but no. Thus….I introduce to you: Operation Plantoflauge.

I found the tallest plant stand I could and tested out all the large plants HD had to offer. Andy was amusing the baby while I kept asking him: “Can you see me?” “What about this one? It’s bushy but short. Or this one that’s tall but skimpy?” There were a couple of really huge palms, but they were too wide and would probably blind my neighbor. This one that we settled on wasn’t the tallest, but it is dense. Hopefully with some TLC it will head up a bit more.

What I really would like to do…for Operation Plantoflauge II…is to get some hanging plants to hang over this one, so eventually the two will meet and form a living curtain. I will keep you updated.

Most of the Master Gardener classes have been pretty practical: soil and water conservation, basic botany, integrated pest management. This past Thursday, though, we got to get our hands dirty and play. VT actually has a real course in floral design complete with a giant refrigerator room and shelves of various flower containers, mountains of that weird green foam stuff, and sort of scary knives. The instructor, who also taught our botany class, gave us a quick overview of floral design, and then we jumped in. (Well, a bunch of us went and ate cookies while the others took all the good flowers.) Here’s what I made.

At the end of the class, the instructor gave a brief critique to everyone. He said mine was a european botanical. European ’cause I squished in lots of flowers and botanical because when he called “5 minutes left,” I started jamming in a bunch of greenery to cover up the foam base. It really was a lot of fun, and I have to quiet the urge to run out and buy a scary floral knife and some of that alien foam. (I asked the instructor what the foam is made out of, and he said, “It’s a secret.” I thought he was kidding, but apparently the floral foam market is very hush hush.)

I asked Anya if she thought I should quit my job and become a florist. She looked at me and said:

I said, “Fine, be a big ole meanie butt! Go play with your v-smile!” She said, “Uh, I don’t have a v-smile because they are dumb. How about I read my book?”

Nancy at Keeping the Farm tagged us to post five things about ourselves.

Five Things About Cabol

1. I don’t have a favorite color. For a while it was green. Then when I met Andy, his love for purple infected me, too. But now, I can’t really say any one color is my favorite. It really just depends.

2. I only have half a nail on my left big toe. Which half? The middle half. When I was in high school I had some toenail problems, and both sides of the nail were killed off in two separate and excrutiatingly painful procedures. In one of them, I have a very vivid memory of the main doctor sitting at a computer playing video games while the student doctor did the procedure. At one point, main doctor checks up on student doctor and says, “No, no! Jam it in farther!”

3. I love composting. I really love vermicomposting. It’s like having a few thousand cute, wiggly pets who never have to go to the vet, don’t need any grooming, and eat for free. At my last job, I somehow convinced them to let me keep a worm bin in my office and eventually convinced several other floors to set up worm bins, too. The year I kept track, my floor composted a ton of organic waste. (Not all of that went into the worm bins. I took some home ’cause worms are kind of tiny and can only eat so much.) I was sometimes called The Worm Lady of Fleming.

4. The Little Prince bothers me intensely. A little kid living on a planet about the size of a VW bug? What does he eat? Where does he poo? How can the thing even have gravity or an atmosphere? Who cuts his hair? Where did his clothes come from? It’s just plain freaky. Nothing quite bothered me in the same way until those creepy caveman commercials came out. What the heck are cavemen doing here? And, ya know, even if they somehow managed to get frozen and then thawed out recently, they wouldn’t be all educated and well groomed and standing upright. It’s just wrong. Utterly wrong.

5. I took five or six years of French class, and all I can really remember is how to ask if your goldfish are wearing pantyhose.

I tag Andy, Anya, and Larry to post five things about themselves.